Totally agree. Investors are the worst at pushing this. And they do it with a lot of psychological tactics. We’ve been really fortunate to have great lead investors who are available to us and support us too. I think it’s very rare.
We (OP here - Estimote) have a significant team in Europe doing just that. Working on sensor networks. Interestingly our customers are in the US and we went through YC and have mostly Silicon Valley investors.
As far as winning out vs competitors, efficiency can be key. There is no question there.
One of the things about frontier tech (autonomous, AR, sensor networks, ML) is that many people are funded and do it too early. So they need to somehow last.
Most startups spend the money within two years or less. It’s programmed into the psychy. A Sequoia would never admit this but they want you to spend your money fast and move on to the next thing if you aren’t growing fast enough. Buying one more year can be crucial.
Thanks yes I totally meant scale. Main cost of new ASIC chips is design and fabrication. Only serve a very narrow specific purpose and all that cost is sunk. But after that, unit production chip cost is negligible.
Seems like a lot of room to innovate with technology, and I bet Amazon is banking on that.
This reminds me a lot of Amazon marketplace, where they took the core service (Amazon e-commerce) and opened it up to others without holding inventory. They can use other people’s orders to gain even more scale and drive costs down lower in the distribution network, commoditizing the complement layer (delivery, in this case UPS and FedEx).
Analog circuitry is the most complex in chip design. It's part art part science. At the end of the day radio waves are traveling through the air and a lot of things can go wrong.
Author of the piece here. Thanks for the perspective. Note it's interesting that Tesla was able to start out (with a fraction of Apple's resources) by building their first car on the Lotus platform. The mechanical stuff is interestingly not expensive compared to technology R&D at all. Which makes sense when you think about modern manufacturing and materials.
We have a team of data engineers in data science and PhD's measuring all the signals we receive from the beacons and performing algorithms (e.g. trilateration, least squared etc) and combining this with positioning signals we can process based on positioning of the device. The trick is to account for different devices, different antenna placement on models etc. So over time we build a database that improves accuracy based on usage. Regarding people being present, we can account for that if we predict that signals are reflecting differently based on estimated density. These are super challenging problems so we have a team dedicated to it, and iterate quickly.
Hey this is Steve Cheney from Estimote. We encourage you to experiment. Basically you can cover a fairly large venue (100 feet or more on a side) with just 4 beacons. It depends on some of the variables of the venue -- walls, surfaces, existence of metal and glass for instance. But the point of the SDK is to provide smoothing and consistency and have the phone itself help resolve user location while beacons also continually reduce error propagation of signals. We have a team of PhD's building this product and taking into account tons of smart data science. The ultimate goal is to have a venue covered without requiring an entire "cell network" of beacons. You can get greater accuracy by testing with multiple beacons per wall though. We would love your feedback on what works best for you as you iterate so we can also put these improvements into the SDK.
Hey there one of the Co-Founders of Estimote here, that makes the Sticker Beacons and coined Nearables.
Sometimes we think of Estimote Stickers as 'Tile for Developers', at least among the community that knows Tile.
Meaning, we're a developer facing platform, more B2B2C and anyone can create a digital tethering application, and any app can adopt it.
We have a big vision for the 'Nearables' concept and hope that the community can push this narrative forward together. Sometimes we think abstractly of beacons as place URLs for physical objects.
There definitely will be volume discounts although until we begin shipping in full production in October we won't worry too much about forward pricing. But in the future these stickers will go way below $10 each. Glad you like the product :)
Hey - Steve here from Estimote. If you use iBeacon as the method to talk to the beacon, which would be typical, yes an app is required. But there are innovations happening to allow you to use mobile web or "read" other packet formats. A lot will happen in this space in the next year.
Thanks so much for discussing with us. We’d love to engage with you directly and get you a quote for larger 1,000 and up beacon quantities. I’m available at steve at estimote dot com. Estimote has been 100% focused on making the initial experience with developers easy and fast. As such we’re selling the hardware as a kit for $99. But we don’t charge that much for bulk beacon orders. The challenge with deploying 1,000 beacons is not the beacon cost as you point out – it’s in security, extensibility and all the elements of RAS that a networking protocol carries with it. In fact all of those are smaller parts of your overall cost, which is to build a mobile app and experience. We understand that. These deployments are much more similar to enterprise Wi-Fi in that regard – access points are a small percentage of the deployment of Wi-Fi. In fact, even one site deployment of beacons which needs to be switched out (say due to failure) would cost more than the beacons themselves. Which is why saving a few thousand dollars on beacons makes no sense. Trust me we’re tripling down on 100% fully integrated hw / sw in order to create the tools and end to end experience that developers need to be successful.
It would have been much more helpful if he had actually defined Airbnb's culture or shared some values. While I admire the note to employees and I'm sure it spurred a discussion at the company, there was no reference to what their culture was before or after the letter.
Clarification - your app can only be possible on Android because it's a widget app which Apple doesn't allow. So it makes sense you're Android only. Some paid apps like yours do well on Android (congrats) but I am really referencing bigger products / services.
The study suggests that people take actions on iOS and not on Android. Since most of FB's mobile ads are in fact mobile app installs, people are interacting and using the medium - 18x more on iOS than on Android.
It's just one ad related study but the magnitude of the difference is staggering.
The jailbreak community, who overall do very good things for users, are shooting themselves in the foot by not having the Cydia store work properly once you jailbreak --- the store is totally down, servers slammed. They had 6 months to prepare for this? why don't they correct it? people's first impressions (who have never jailbroken before) are that the process is terrible.